I’ve said before that “migration” is a difficult topic to understand. It’s complex. To really begin to understand it, you have to be open to examining the issue from many different perspectives. For example, you not only need to keep up with modern reporting on the issue, you also need to understand the history of immigration policy, and you need to look at the data.
If you think all the bad news on immigration is only Donald Trump’s fault, then you might not know that it was a Clinton administration change that made it so immigrants could be easily deported over minor violations. The record number of deportations under the Obama administration and the record number of human rights abuses of immigrants under the Trump administration were/are, in large part, thanks to groundwork laid by the Clinton administration.
But it goes back even further than that. Actually, despite America’s reputation as a “nation of immigrants,” there has never been a time in this country’s history where we as a nation sat down and developed a logical immigration system from the ground up.
What we call the “immigration system” is actually just a haphazard hodgepodge of different laws passed by the Legislative branch at different times, confusingly mixed with the immigration enforcement priorities set by the Executive Branch, which sometimes change wildly every four years.
Most of the history of changes to immigration law under the Legislative Branch are tied to exclusionary policies. At one point in this nation’s history, people felt that too many Chinese immigrants had come (whose labor was exploited to develop our railroad system), so the country wanted a Chinese Exclusion Act just to say, “No more Chinese.”
The same thing happened after so many Italian immigrants came here. Our country decided to pass the Immigration Act of 1924 to limit European immigration.
Most of the history of this nation’s immigration policies involve negation. In comparison, there isn’t much history about designing a comprehensive immigration system.
So when you read current events about immigration, it’s important to understand everything you read in light of history. There is nothing about our current immigration system in the U.S.A. that should be understood as disconnected from the past two hundred years of U.S. foreign policy established by the Monroe Doctrine.
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Or did you know that since 1927, maybe 90% of removals of immigrants from the U.S.A. were not deportations but voluntary departures? Ironically named, “voluntary departure” is not usually a free choice. The option for voluntary departure was essentially created to remove immigrants faster without having to go through extensive deportation proceedings, which would mean respecting due process.
Where to Look to Understand the Real Data?
To learn about the history of immigration policies, check out Mapping Deportations. They record a fair amount of immigration policy history here: https://mappingdeportations.com/timeline-1877-1929/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.
But more importantly, check out their deportation data visualization. This shows you historically who have been the main targets of deportations: https://mappingdeportations.com/2025/09/15/deportations-by-year/.
There is also a new deportation data initiative that was started this year. It’s a little harder to read without spending more time with it, but if you want more accurate data about deportations under the second Trump administration, look here: Deportation Data Project.
You can also do a deep dive of data on the immigration courts via TRAC. With the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, you can even look up your local immigration court and check out patterns of how your local immigration judges adjudicate certain cases: tracreports.org.
If you need something simpler to navigate, recently the American Immigration Council made an interactive visual tool about the immigration courts: Immigration Court Data - American Immigration Council.
Also see this article from the AIC: Where Can You Win in Immigration Court? - American Immigration Council. It’s one of the most comprehensive reports I’ve see in years. If you have time to read it in-depth, you will learn a lot. If you don’t have time, at least skim to look at the graphs and subsection titles to get the point.
The point is, when it comes to the immigration court system, immigrants who don’t get access the legal representation are more likely to be removed.
If you want to know what you can do about this, consider supporting the growing movement for localized legal funds. If you’re in the Kansas City area, we have a new initiative to crowdsource money for legal representation.